A power grid, such as an electrical grid, may be configured to provide electricity from suppliers to consumers. The power grid may be associated with one or more substations configured to provide electricity distribution functionality. The grid may be managed by a distribution management system (DMS). For example, in a DMS a substation may comprise a substation computer configured to communicate with one or more field intelligent electronic devices (IEDs), such as electronic relays, capacitor bank controllers, electronic fault indicators, smart electricity meters, and/or other distribution network sensors and/or controllers. The substation computer may comprise computational resources, such as a programmable logic controller (PLC), that may execute various tasks associated with the power grid.
A network control center may be configured to manage one or more substations. The network control center may comprise sophisticated computational hardware (e.g., multi-core processors) configured to provide real-time processing of data associated with the power grid. For example, the network control center may maintain a global power network model logically representing components within the power grid. The network control center may host various grid management applications, such as fault detection isolation restoration (FDIR) applications, network reconfiguration applications, voltage volt-ampere reactive (var) control applications, etc., that may utilize the global power network model. In this way, a grid management application, hosted by the network control center, may send control commands to substations based upon the global power network model.